The Voyager

Clarissa Connelly is a musician from Scotland, living in Copenhagen. She has immersed herself in the local music scene there, but also in the local landscape and folklore. Both feed into her music, which has been excellently described as 'Pagan Pop.' She describes how her love of nature influenced the cover for her album The Voyager, as well as its contents.

I try to find beautiful places around where I live, and love spending time researching different areas. Mostly the historical and geological perspective of places interest me a lot. In Denmark where I live, the hills aren't that tall compared to Scotland where I grew up. The landscape is very flat; but still very diverse with lots of movement. Due to the past three ice ages there are many areas where the ice has pushed the soil and created dead ice holes and the big rivers of melted ice have molded the landscape, creating beautiful valleys. Denmark has many preserved monuments from the bronze stone age such as burial mounds and dolmens, and I have always found it inspirational to think of the large time span from then to now. The sketches for The Voyager were written on hikes through Denmark, and the cover is a picture taken at this Viking fortress in West Sealand called Trelleborg. It's an absolutely beautiful place that’s very well preserved considering the fact that it was built in the 980s. I also filmed the video for Holler at this site, wanting to show all the different views around the fortress. The font on the cover is created by artist Sufie Elmgreen, one of my friends here from Copenhagen.

On the hikes, writing the first sketches for the album, finding information through Google Maps and through the internet proved to be difficult, so I started figuring out a way to gather information from all these monuments and beautiful places in Denmark, but the storage space on my phone got filled up so quickly! That’s why I created the app Vandringen (in English, the hike or the walk) to gather relevant and necessary information, but also to map it, making it easy to see if the hill beside you is a burial mound or just another normal hill. While writing the compositions for different locations, many of my friends started to show interest, so the app now also functions as an online gallery for site specific works from over 20 different artists. This is only the beginning though. Now the first 20 artists will choose the 20 next ones to create the next pool of works for 2021, and I hope the project will continue many years from now.

- Hook Journal

Tracklist

1. Holler
2. Bargain
3. Walden
4. Theresa!
5. Latitude
6. Longitude
7. Mother and Daddy
8. The Fallen Land
9. Shallow Water
10. A Grain of Sand
11. The Hills are Crying